hrothgar, on May 4 2010, 03:39 PM, said:
luke warm, on May 4 2010, 10:46 PM, said:
assuming for the sake of argument that the resurrection of Jesus went to civil court, how do you think a jury would find based on the preponderence of evidence?
I think that this depends an awful lot on where you convened said jury...
I'd expect a very different verdict in, say, Tokyo or Stockholm than I would in the Bible Belt.
With this said and done, if folks were ruling strictly on hard evidence, I'd be shocked if any credible jury was able to find in favor of the resurrection.
Lukewarm presumably thinks that he'd be able to call witnesses who claimed to actually see the death, the entombment, and the later appearance of the allegedly deceased person.
This is because, I assume, he accepts that the version of the bible he read/had drilled into him, was factually accurate: an attitude that is incredibly idiotic and irrational.
Consider the answers to the following questions:
What is the date of creation of the earliest known versions of the new testament?
What evidence is there of any earlier written version?
What evidence is there that anyone who was a follower of Jesus, during jesus' lifetime, knew how to write?
What evidence is there that if any of them knew how to write, they actually recorded anything?
Why is it that some of the early gospels, which from any objective view of documentary authenticity (and I am not speaking of historical accuracy, just of when and how and by whom they were physically created) were rejected by the organized church, while others, which are not entirely consistent with each other, were accepted?
Consider: the earliest gospels are believed to have been written anywhere from several decades to almost 150 years after Jesus died. Life expectancy back then was very low, and would have been lower than the norm for the working class: presumably people with more money lived better, even if health care was abysmal for all: they were less exposured to injury (and any open wound pre-anti-bitoics could be lethal) or other forms of hardship.
There were few means of recording events and none of recording sight and sound. There was no understanding of the most basic aspects of natural phenonema, such as thunder and lightning, or algae blooms in water, or earthquakes, etc. All were given a supernatural cause. Bacteria were not even thought of, let alone discovered and so on.
Against that backdrop, what we see are inconsistent versions of stories about a charismatic leader, from a culture in which cults were commonplace, in a society that viewed itself as 'chosen' and yet was subjugated to the Romans. And these stories were written by people who almost certainly did not witness any of the events they described, almost certainly never even laid eyes on their central character, and probably never met anybody who had.
They were written, also, as part of an effort to build a cult into a religion. How many non-mormons accept the story about the golden plates? How many non-scientologists accept the story about aliens being transported to earth and tied down next to volcanoes, that killed them, leaving their engrams to bedevil us to this day? Stories like those are rejected by normal people because we see why they are propagated, while at the same time we see how they are based on ridiculous assertions of highly improbable events, offered without any more proof than 'believe me'.
So too are the gospels. The only difference is that the cult in whose service they were fabricated was a huge success, and that one of its most successful practices is to discourage critical thinking about itself.
In a courtroom, a lawyer would be laughed out of court if he tried to prove his case by offering, as truth, stories written by non-witnesses, let alone witnesses who can reasonably be seen to have a private agenda.
To assume that just because the gospels describe certain happenings means that those occurred is a revelation of stupidity.
If Lukewarm came up with a semi-illiterate, superstitious witness who swore to the truth of the resurrection, I strongly suspect that I would have a wonderful time in cross examination. Nobody who has not been or witnessed an aggressive, skilled cross examination has any idea what it is like. It ain't like the movies, but it can and usually does expose the weaknesses in the evidence.
Can I categorically disprove the resurrection? Of course not, and as others have pointed out, Lukewarm can't disprove a myriad of silly assertions (such as the FSM) either. The difference is that atheists and rationalists (the 2 often overlap) tend to reject as unproven and thus not reliable all stories that are inconsistent with the current scientific view of the universe, while religious believers only reject those that are not part of their mythology. And the saddest part of that is that they usually don't even see what they are doing.
On second thoughts, perhaps the saddest thing is that, according to one widely publicized survey, more than 70% of americans said that if science clearly proved that an article of their religious faith was wrong, they'd reject the science. So, to defeat the resurrectionists in court would require a jury, the majority of whom were not closed minded bigots. And, in the US, that seems, as far as religious issues are concerned, only slightly less likely than in the Vatican.
Finally, the questions I posed about the gospels are merely those that sprang to mind as I was typing. I have no doubt, at all, that reflection on the matter would generate a large number of additional problems with a belief structure founded on the accuracy of these scraps of parchment or other ancient writing media.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
Help
I gave that joke a little spin and added a twist of Sherlock Holmes to come up with the god who didn't bark in the night and the dyslexic theist. 
It amused me. But then, I'm a funny guy.